[This story contains a major spoiler from The Madison‘s first three episodes.]
If you were expecting a Dutton to walk into a scene of The Madison, you aren’t the only one.
“We kept waiting for a script to drop where a Dutton would come,” Patrick J. Adams, who plays the man who married into The Madison‘s starring Clyburn family, tells The Hollywood Reporter about reading his first scripts of the Taylor Sheridan series. “That was certainly a question because that’s how it was in the world. And when we asked about it, it was like, ‘No, no, no. This is an independent thing. This is its own thing.’”
The Madison was first announced back in 2023, when Paramount Network also confirmed that TV’s No. 1 series, Yellowstone, was plotting its endgame. The Madison then had a working title of 2024 and was described as the first-ever Yellowstone sequel. The present-day story was said to take place after the events of Yellowstone, and would continue exploring the Dutton family dynasty “with new characters and locations, as well as some existing characters.” It was given a straight-to-series order to stream on Paramount+.
All of that changed, however, once Sheridan began writing what has been described by Paramount+ as the most intimate series yet from the prolific hit-maker who launched the Yellowstone-verse — including prequels 1883 and 1923 — as well as other successes for the streamer like Lioness, Mayor of Kingstown and Tulsa King, and who has now spawned a series of Dutton family sequels, including Marshals, now airing on CBS.
In a novel release schedule, The Madison released its first three episodes this past weekend, with the final three coming on Saturday. Even more unique, however, was its filming process. Sheridan, who first courted Michelle Pfeiffer in the starring role of Clyburn matriarch Stacy, was so deadset on Kurt Russell playing her husband, Preston, that he filmed a second season before the first even released to accommodate the actor.
The Madison filmed season one late summer to fall of 2024 without Russell, who was filming his Apple series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. It wasn’t until production returned in the same window of 2025 that Russell joined the cast in both Montana and Fort Worth, Texas, where he filmed his scenes for both seasons one and two. That means Pfeiffer filmed the entirety of season one without her scene partner.
“I was not happy about that,” Pfeiffer tells THR with a laugh. “It was touch and go if they were going to make [Kurt’s] schedule work. But Taylor was insisting it was going to happen, so I just decided, ‘OK, it’s Kurt.’ And because I know him, that was pretty easy to conjure up.”
Pfeiffer and Russell had worked together years earlier in the 1988 film Tequila Sunrise. It was Pfeiffer and Sheridan who figured out how to make it work with Russell’s schedule, and the pair then pitched it to Paramount. Yellowstone alum Christina Voros, who directed all six episodes, acknowledges, “I sort of forgot that it might look strange to the outside world to schedule a show that way,” then adding, “Once you see them together, it feels so inevitable, you can’t imagine it being anyone else.”
When introducing the series at its New York premiere, Sheridan, in a rare public appearance, acknowledged how hard it is to get shows made in this industry, and that includes the labor of love that went into The Madison.
“Everyone in this project — and in every project that we do, but [especially] with this one — to make a project with me is really difficult because I choose really inhospitable places to film … This is a very emotionally taxing project because it’s about grief and family and tearing apart and coming back together, so it demanded a lot and it demanded a lot of everyone,” he said before introducing his director and cast, along with a screening of the first episode.
The series follows the New York City family of the Clyburns to Montana after their family suffers an immense tragedy — Preston, while visiting his brother (played by Matthew Fox), dies in a plane crash, along with said brother. The Manhattanites, also including the grieving daughters played by Beau Garrett and Elle Chapman, are fish out of water when they land in the mountains and begin to pick their family back up through the stages of grief — and the series does not portray New Yorkers kindly.
“In my early 20s, I moved to New York like a lot of actors and I had a love-hate relationship with this city,” Sheridan explained. “I loved it, it just didn’t love me back. And I have been back and forth and watched it evolve and change. Sometimes you have to leave a place to really know it and love it, and this is a story of a family that has to leave it to learn to love it again.”
So no, there are no Duttons in The Madison. And even though they filmed what seems to be two-season limited series, Sheridan and the crew are planning for many seasons.
“I think I speak for everyone when I say we would shoot this gladly forever,” says Adams. “We’ve found something kind of miraculously special here and as long as it’s a story that people want to hear, we’d be happy to tell it.”
Pfeiffer echoes that they are all very much hoping for a third season.
Voros adds, “Any time you get a show together with a cast like this you kind of want it to go forever. And I think having completed the second season, you just fall more and more in love with them as a family. What’s interesting about it is that it’s very much going to resonate with people who have been watching shows in the Yellowstone-verse for a very long time, but it’s also going to draw in people who would not necessarily gravitate to the more muscular and masculine action-driven content of some of Taylor’s bigger shows like Yellowstone or Lioness. It is a simpler story in many ways on the surface, but infinitely more complicated, emotionally, underneath it. There are an abundance of river references to be made when describing The Madison.”
The Madison releases the final three episodes of season one Saturday on Paramount+.
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